Jeffrey Deaver, The Empty Chair

The Empty Chair is Jeffery Deaver's third Lincoln Rhymes outing after 1997's The Bone Collector and 1998's The Coffin Dancer. Here Rhymes travels to North Carolina to undergo experimental surgery that hopefully will improve his mobility. While waiting at the hospital he is approached by the local police for help in a kidnapping.

From the beginning Rhymes is uneasy. Something is not right. 16-year-old Garrett Hanlon, recently orphaned, has kidnapped two young women after killing a young university boy who appears to have tried to stop him. As he is not familiar with his surroundings, Rhymes solicits help from a local boy studying marine biology and the game begins. The cat and mouse game leads Rhymes' sidekick Amelia through the swamplands of North Carolina with a small group of local cops.

Deaver's conversational style quickly gives background information on all the characters and exposes the "animosity" held by the locals. Just when you think you have the case sussed, he pulls the rug out from under you. In this book, Deaver takes Lincoln out of his familiar New York setting and deposits him in small-town and backwoods North Carolina. And instead of the usual master criminal, he finds himself pitted against a 16-year-old loser with a bad complexion and an encyclopedic knowledge of insects.

Many of the characters in this book are vivid and well drawn, and the dialogue is excellent throughout. Garrett is one of the author's best creations, at once a brilliant, deadly adversary and a pathetic wreck of a human being. The book could easily be a movie synopsis, with great action scenes and psychological thrills. I hope someone takes this forward as it could be as good as, if not better than, "The Bone Collector."

I think the only thing I can advise is that you read the books in their intended order. Although they are stand alone stories, if you read "The Stone Monkey," his next Rhymes tale, before this it will spoil some of the suspense.

So here is the reading order:

The Bone Collector;

The Coffin Dancer;

The Empty Chair;

The Stone Monkey;

The Vanished Man.

The book is available at all major book dealers and can be bought for as little as 90p from Amazon. If you like a page-turner then this is a book for you.